1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for generating contract documents, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for generating custom contract documents using standard terms and conditions while eliminating the need for a library of multiple form agreements.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Advances in computer processing power and network communications have made information from a wide variety of sources available to users on computer networks. Computer networking allows network computer users to share information, software applications and hardware devices, and internetworking enables a set of physical networks to be connected into a single network, such as the Internet. Computers connected to the Internet or connected to networks other than the Internet also have access to information stored on those networks. The World Wide Web (Web), a hypermedia system used on the Internet, enables hypertext linking, whereby documents automatically reference or link other documents located on connected computer networks around the world. Thus, users connected to the Internet have almost instant access to information stored in relatively distant regions.
A page of information on the Web may include references to other Web pages and may include a broad range of multimedia data including textual, graphical, audio, and animation information. Currently, Internet users retrieve information from the Internet, through the Web by “visiting” a web site on a computer that is connected to the Internet.
The website is, in general terms, a server application that displays information stored on a network server computer. The web site accepts connections from client programs, such as Internet browser applications. Browser applications, such as Microsoft Explorer™ or Netscape Internet Browser™, allow Internet users to access information displayed on the website. Most browser applications display information on computer screens and permit a user to navigate through the Web using a mouse. Like other network applications, Web browsing uses a client-server paradigm. When given a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of a document, the browser application becomes a client and contacts a server application specified in the URL to request the document. After receiving the document from the server application, the browser application displays the document to the user. When the browser application interacts with the server application, the two applications follow the Hyper-Text Transport Protocol (HTTP). HTTP allows the browser application to request a specific article, which the server application then returns. To ensure that browser applications and server applications inter-operate unambiguously, HTTP defines the exact format for requests sent from the browser application to the server application as well as the format of replies that the server application returns.
With the proliferation of physical networks connected to the Internet, many websites have become accessible to business users of the Internet as a virtual marketplace, commonly referred to as e-commerce or business to business (B2B). This virtual marketplace allows businesses to do over the Internet what in the past could only be done in person, telephonically, or in writing. While efforts to date have improved the automation of generating contract documents by storing standard contract language, i.e., “boilerplate,” and prompting users to input terms that are unique to a particular contract, the related art has not shifted the paradigm for generating contracts in an on-line B2B virtual marketplace environment. Furthermore, while orders for goods and services are commonly placed on-line, the remainder of the e-commerce transaction—contract negotiation and contract generation—is still largely performed off-line.